Yvonne Rainer. Three Seascapes, “Climax and Dénoument,” 1962. Performed by Patricia Hoffbauer at the Getty, Los Angeles, May 8–9, 2004. Photo: Patricia Kikuchi. © 2005 J. Paul Getty Trust. 48 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 Yvonne Rainer, Muciz Lover DOUGLAS CRIMP As an epigraph, I quote a quotation of a quotation—Yvonne Rainer/ John Cage/Arnold Schoenberg. Rainer: John Cage’s famous story may be relevant here: After I had been studying with him for two years, Schönberg said, “In order to write music you must have a feeling for harmony.” I then explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.” In my case, lacking a “feeling” for plot and character, the essentials of traditional narrative, I have devoted much of my career to banging my head against that wall— with no expectations, I should add, of gaining entrance to a narrative mainstream, but rather to wrestle with its prescriptions.1 Nearly thirty years after moving from dance to film as her principal medium,2 Yvonne Rainer was asked by Mikhail Baryshnikov to choreograph a piece for his White Oak Dance Project. The resulting work, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2000. It took the form Rainer had developed in the late 1960s that she called, alternately, “performance demonstrations,” “performance fractions,” or “composites,” in which she combined fragments of earlier dances, new dance material, spoken monologues, slide projections, films, and sound tapes.3 One of those works, Rose Fractions (1969), constituted Rainer’s infamous Broadway debut at the Billy Rose Theater. The infamy derives from Rainer’s having shown, on the second evening of the run, a hard-core porn film juxtaposed with her own Trio Film in which dancers Steve Paxton and Becky Arnold, both nude, form a trio with a large white balloon and move methodically around and over the completely white furniture in the completely white Dakota apartment of Virginia Dwan, the dealer in minimal art. All the while, Rainer recited a Lenny Bruce monologue, “On Snot,” delivered with the flat intonation of someone reading a text but not “getting” the joke, or—better— Grey Room 22, Winter 2005, pp. 48–67. © 2006 Douglas Crimp 49 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 creating a form of wacky humor out of not reading with the expected inflection (which might, after all, be compared with dance phrasing—something Rainer had challenged several years before in what has become her most famous dance, Trio A from The Mind Is a Muscle): I’m going to tell you the dirtiest word you ever heard on stage. It’s just disgusting! I’m not going to look at you when I say it, cause this way we won’t know who said it. I may blame that cat over there. It’s a four-letter word, starts with “s” and ends with “t” . and . just don’t take me off the stage, just . don’t embarrass my Mom. I’ll go quietly. The word is—Oh, I’m going to say it and just get it done with. I’m tired of walking the streets. “Snot!” I can’t look at you, but that’s the word: snot.4 Snot had a precursor appearance, in the Latinate rather than Germanic form of the word, in Performance Demonstration, the first of Rainer’s composite pieces, presented at the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in September 1968. It surfaced in a different sort of routine, a diatribe against the use of music for dance in which the word “music” is consistently mispronounced in variations on Muzak, a term that had recently come into common use to denote canned background music played in elevators, department stores, and other com- mercial spaces.5 One mispronunciation is spelled m-u-c-i-z, “muciz.” Rainer came to call this her “mucus rant.” The mono- logue begins with a description of Trio Film before the film itself had been made: The most flagrant omission today [in the Lincoln Center Performance Demonstration] is a film that will be shot in a large white living room with two large white sofas and two large white nudes—one male, one female—and one large white balloon about four feet in diameter. The film is neither pornographic nor racist. The nudes never touch. They are either separated by the balloon between them or are apart in space. They walk with the balloon between them in and out of the frame. Many variations on balloon- male-female relationships within a very narrow format. It is not a symbolic film, although obviously these descrip- tions suggest possibilities for metaphorical reading.6 Eventually Rainer comes to the antimusic portion of her mono- logue: That’s right, I would like to say that I am a music-hater. The only remaining meaningful role for muzeek in relation to dance is to be totally absent or to mock itself. To use “serious” muzach simultaneously with dance is to give a 50 Grey Room 22 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 glamorous “high art” aura to what is seen. To use “Program” moosick or pop or rock is to generate excitement or col- oration which the dance itself would not otherwise evoke. The medium in which Rainer sees this bad symbiosis most clearly is, not surprisingly, film: True: mussuck is rarely far (in time) from an above-ground film image, but in this case a hybrid beast has emerged which I shall designate as “movie-museek,” a form that extends the image and merges with it rather than calling attention to its own quality or lack of quality. A conse- quence of this kind of subordination is that the closer movie-moozeek approaches cliché and mediocrity the more clarified its function in successfully interacting with the film image. [M]ediocre music did not reach its zenith until the movies began to exploit the colossal talents of composers such as Dimitri Tiomkin and Henry Mancini. The range and depth of the explorations by these men into the hack- neyed nuances of sound stereotype and feeling-form correlations stagger the imagination. Their work makes all previous work in the same genre seem stunted and unambitious.7 “I am all for one medium at a time,” insists Rainer.8 As she says all this, on tape, she and Becky Arnold perform the section of The Mind Is a Muscle called Mat. The “mucus rant” is, thus, a sound score of sorts for this part of Performance Demonstration, and so the work hardly consists of “one medium at a time.” Rainer is here demonstrating that saying “no” to music for dance is not sufficient. “When dances are performed in silence—and practically everyone has done one at some point in one’s career—they are still considered either dry or revolutionary or both.”9 Rainer would seem to want her dances to solicit more complex reactions than the easy knowingness of that epithet “dry and revolutionary.” In the “mucus rant” Rainer spells and pronounces music correctly in only one context, when she speaks of Erik Satie, and here she also suggests one possibility for her own use of music: “In Satie’s idea of furniture music (although not in the music itself) I see an alternative that has not been followed thru in theater: Meesik-to-sit-and-wait-by. A juxtaposition in time with visual elements rather than a superimposition.”10 Although this suggests something closer to the musical interludes Rainer sometimes used between “fractions” of her composite pieces, Rainer’s dances all employed what she would later come to call “radical juxtapositions”—of bodies, objects, sounds, and images—and music is more often than not a key Crimp | Yvonne Rainer, Muciz Lover 51 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434440 by guest on 03 October 2021 component. For her first dance, Three Satie Spoons (1961), Rainer applied John Cage’s Fontana Mix to the score of Satie’s own Trois Gymnopédies. She used Satie again in 1962 for Satie for Two, set to his Trois Gnossiennes.11 Three Seascapes, also from 1962, used the final movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in the first Seascape and La Monte Young’s Poem for Tables, Chairs, and Benches in the second; for the third part, Rainer made her own music by throwing a scream- ing tantrum in a pile of tulle—her version of Fokine’s Dying Swan, as I see it. The next year, 1963, in We Shall Run, Rainer had over a dozen people jog in a group, from which one, two, or a few occasionally break away and then eventually rejoin; the music for the piece is the “Tuba mirum” from Berlioz’s Requiem. At My Body’s House (1964) opened with Rainer standing still for three minutes accompanied by very loud organ music by Dietrich Buxtehude. From the beginning of her career as a choreographer, Rainer had combined other sounds with the “dance music.” In Three Satie Spoons she made squeaking noises and repeatedly said, “The grass is greener when the sun is yellower.” For The Bells (1962), Rainer remembers speaking the line “I told you every- thing would be all right, Harry.” Also in 1962, her Ordinary Dance employed an autobiographical spoken monologue.